And Volva volva volva probably gives you some clue as to how insistent Linnaeus was that a certain sea snail had a shell shaped like a part of a lady’s anatomy.

Alright, that shit was funny.

In particular the use of tautonyms is annoying to me: Gorilla gorilla, Tyrranus tyrannus, and all the rest.

That’s usually caused by an overly broad historical taxon being made to fit a modern taxonomy.

For instance, suppose you are some 17th century wealthy drone with a passion for a certain type of beetle. You collect a bunch of them and name this beetle after your girlfriend, Ludmigzilla. Hundreds of years later, somebody does a DNA analysis on all the syntypes of ludmigzilla and finds out they are not the same bug! In fact ludmigzilla is a genus, not a species, but oh noes the genus slot is already filled.

So there’s an international dust-up, entomologists and wet chemists and DNA pseudo-scientists get into fistfights in the corridors, and when it all settles there’s now a new family or sub-family, and the original species is now ludmigzilla ludmigzilla, and the other former syntypes are promoted to holotypes of ludmigzilla backhair, ludmigzilla chestpair, and ludmigzilla dunher.

Seriously, that’s how it works.

Unfortunately it’s a boring terrestrial orchid that grows insanely high in the Andes.

Good Latin names not only follow grammatical rules, they can be beautiful. Or honor a really worthy scientist. Why not make the most of such a wonderful opportunity?

One of my botany student friends was studying a cactus whose name meant “many-nippled breast”, unfortunately I can’t remember the scientific name. The name was a good description though :-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammillaria

http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/4323547

My favorites are the slime-mold beetles named after Buch, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Darth Vader.

My favorite insect name: Aha ha.

And if you do a quick image search, you’ll see Amorphophallus is quite descriptive.